The Savage Young Beatles: Documenting the Start of Something Big in Hamburg

Have you got youthful fire to burn, old school rock chops, and a passing resemblance to Paul McCartney, or maybe Pete Best? If so, Mark Ashmore might want to talk to you. But you’ll have to pass muster with hundreds, maybe thousands of Beatles fans around the world first.

Ashmore is the 32-year-old co-founder of Future Artists, a DIY film and digital media company based in Manchester, UK, and the producer of its newest movie venture, The Beatles: Young and Reckless in Hamburg. Now in the research and pre-production phase, this music documentary aims to be in-depth recollection/re-creation of the Fab Four (then five) during their early ’60s residency in the German seaport town.

It’s no exaggeration to call that period formative – you’d only be echoing John Lennon, who said, “I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg.” Arriving as teenagers, the Beatles played up to eight hours a night for weeks on end in dive clubs in the city’s notorious Reeperbahn, forging their style and sound in one of the places where sex and drugs truly met rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s a story that’s been well mythologized but, according to Ashmore, never properly told on film, and Future Artists is promising a fully “fan-powered” doc. That means not just the now requisite crowdfunding campaign (currently in full swing at Indiegogo), but reaching out to the global Beatles community via social media and fan sites for memories, memorabilia, leads, script consulting, and even help casting dramatized scenes of Hamburg’s historic meeting with Merseybeat. It’s a uniquely ambitious music doc project, about which we chatted with Ashmore on Facebook earlier this week.

MFW: You’re a four-year-old film and media collective working at a really DIY/indie level. What made you decide to take on the world’s most famous rock ‘n’ roll band?

Mark Ashmore: The Beatles started out like us! Hamburg was where they learned their trade. I guess for the past four years we have been also doing an apprenticeship. We really enjoy learning and figuring out what makes creativity happen, and so a chance to reflect on our own practice while exploring the biggest band in the world’s early days just seemed like a good idea. The Hamburg days for a lot of bands – not just the Beatles, also people like Tony Sheridan – there was a whole scene happening in Hamburg that during its day, people in the UK, teenagers, did not know about. It was only afterward that people are like, “Yeah, Hamburg.” And most recollections we have come across are rose-tinted versions or third-hand accounts.

What’s your own Beatles story?

discovered the Beatles through listening to Oasis, as they always referenced them. And my dad had a couple of tapes, the blue and red albums from the 1970s. This was my first exposure – from there it just grew and grew. I’m a second-generation fan who learned about the Fab Four from my parents and from TV, books, etc. During my A-levels I started trying to draw and paint using “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as a reference point, trying to artistically re-create the lyrics and a vision on canvas.

Were the Beatles a formative influence, then, on your decision to make the visual arts your career? Do you feel like that’s still common in your generation?

The Beatles and John Lennon are a massive influence on me, but not really the music – the culture and the ideas that they surrounded [themselves with] and came up with, the concept of Apple as a company, and the Apple shop. We built the Black Lion in Salford [a pub where Future Artists runs a performance and film space] along the same vision, but they did it first. The Beatles had so many firsts, and their work rate was incredible. My generation are real slackers. One of the main reasons for doing this project is to show talent will get you so far but you have to put the hours in to become a success. Today everyone thinks they can become a YouTube star and be in the media spotlight for 15 minutes. They haven’t made it, they just opened a YouTube account.

What specifically resonates for you and your collaborators about the Hamburg period? As opposed to other aspects of the Beatles story?

After Hamburg the Beatles had a manager and were managed. In Hamburg they where young and reckless – thus our title. If you want to find the genesis you have to start at the beginning. As a creative collective, as fans of music, the early days are always the most exciting. So the energy and the drive and the determination of the Hamburg days, that’s what attracted [us] to make a film about this period. For no film to exist about this period except for Backbeat and no real in-depth look during [The Beatles] Anthology, it means this film must be made. But we are making it with the fans, the Future Artists way.

Right, you are calling this a fan-powered documentary. What specifically will that mean in terms of how it gets made, and what viewers will ultimately see? Fans will fund it. We are crowdsourcing the research and our fans are the best at researching. We have four published Beatles authors helping us out. Fans will see the treatment and outline and the script to make comments, and then when the film is being made, fans can be in it. When it comes to distribution, using something like Distrify or the new Vimeo on Demand service, fans can distribute the film, the same way that they heard about it. We are reaching out and using social media to have a real dialogue about this project.

How will fans be in it? Are you crowdsourcing in the sense that people will produce and submit their own material, their own takes on the Beatles in Hamburg, and you will put it together?

We will need 200 extras for the crowd scenes, for a start, all in period costume. And it would be great for some of the original characters from the Hamburg days to make cameos in the film. We will of course be looking for the five Hamburg Beatles, and casting will come via the fans first, before we go down to casting agents, call-outs, etc. Also, fans are helping us with the research and making sure we get everything spot on – design, music, even slang and how people spoke to each other in 1960.

Will this be more in the docudrama vein – a re-creation of the scene? Or a mix of that and interviews, archival material?

It will be mixed media/transmedia. It will be a documentary. It will take you back to 1960-62. We are still working on the details. It won’t be a docudrama, as I think they are quite weak.

We have contacted all the above, and are in dialogue with Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister. We also have quite a few published authors on the subject helping us out, and Beatles Tour-Hamburg – [they] were all musicians during the time that the Beatles played and they were friends with Tony Sheridan. The thing is, quite a few of those that were there are now in their 70s or not with us. Documenting this time is getting harder, so we have make this doc now.

On a practical level I would think it would be quite difficult to try to capture what you want to capture about that era – the notion of Hamburg as this place and period that forged the Beatles we came to know – if you were relying just on interviews and old material. Especially since there isn’t a great deal of documentation from that time – really just Astrid Kerchherr’s photos and a bit of audio.

The most important thing we need is the energy of the stage and the sound of cheap musical instruments coming through a shit PA system. The vibe, the music, and the soul must come through. This was the red light district, cheap beer, whores, and music. We want to show rock ‘n’ roll before it became a mainstream commodity. We will be creating a lot of stuff from scratch, but made from research. We have the Star Club recordings, we have Astrid’s black and white photographs, we have quite a few of them on stage live. This is a great start. We know how they lived. It’s time to immerse ourselves in this and get some great context for the stories that are documented in so many books and interviews about the period.

Is that what you feel like other films like the Anthology or the Scorsese George Harrison doc were missing? In a more philosophical sense, does it have to be an “outsider” project to capture what outsiders the Beatles were then, and to blast through the accumulated Beatles mythology?

The Beatles Anthology and the Harrison film (which was amazing) really focus on the product of the Beatles. Our project will focus on what raw creativity, drive, and determination is in the age of austerity. Remember, Hamburg was a bombed-out wreck, and in 1955 rationing had just ended in Britain, 10 years after World War II. Our film is as much about the times we live in now as the Hamburg days – there is a huge parallel that I can see. We almost need to start over with the Beatles so we can all enjoy them again.

You can get involved in The Beatles: Young and Restless in Hamburg at Future Artists’ Facebook group page for the project. They’re holding a virtual fundraiser for the film this weekend.